Japanese telecom DoCoMo proves H.265 is the future of video

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NTT Domoco, a Japanese telecom, recently released a video demonstrating HVEC — High Efficiency Video Encoding Standard — also known as H.265. DoCoMo says that they have been a big proponent of the H.265 standard since it was first proposed.

In late January, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) approved the H.265 video codec — the successor to the widely used H.264. The approval of this codec by the ITU is the first step towards its mass deployment, making the streaming of HD content more bandwidth efficient and perhaps later bringing 4K video the masses via cable.

H.265 was first announced by the Motion Pictures Experts Group — the folks behind the MPEG format — in August of last year. The group promises that H.265 will be able to reduce bit rates by 39-44% while still maintaining quality. However, early reports say that the average viewer believes there is no degradation to the quality of the video when the bit rate is reduces by as much as 74%.

H.265 is able to cut the bandwidth bill substantially because it incorporates larger blocks of pixels into a “coding tree” format, versus H.264’s macroblocks format.

This could mean that 4K video could be delivered between 20-30 Mbps. A hearty sum of bandwidth, but not impossible over existing Fiber to the Premises offerings from ISPs.

The downside of this new format is that it requires substantially more processing power to decode. In the mobile world, current-gen SoC’s like the Tegra 3 would have their work cut out for them processing through this codec.

DoCoMo says that they will start licensing the H.265 codec for mobile devices in March.